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“The Tudors” received four GeminiAwards from The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television yesterday, the most awarded to any nominated series.

“The Tudors,” with 12 nominations, won Gemini Awards for Best Series Visual Effects, Best Production Design, Best Photography, and Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Supporting Role in a Dramatic Series for Maria Doyle Kennedy. ”

DAVID Starkey, an expert on Henry VIII, has slammed the hit costume drama The Tudors for its blatant inaccuracies.

Starkey, speaking at Cheltenham Literature Festival where he was promoting his latest book about Henry, said the glossy series brought ‘shame’ on the BBC with its ‘ignorance of the facts’.

He also said the show, which ended recently with the execution of Henry’s second wife Anne Boleyn, played by a pouting Natalie Dormer, was ‘terrible history’ and ‘wrong for no reason’ and that the costumes were mostly borrowed from the later Elizabethan period.

The show, starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as King Henry, has been a hit on BBC2 and gained a strong following in the US, despite it’s historical inaccuracies.

More series are planned, hopefully to take us right through Henry’s reign and all of his six wives and speaking personally I can’t wait. We know for sure series three will look at wives number three and four, Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleeves.

It’s great fun, riveting to watch with some super performances and glorious settings. It’s also not meant to be an accurate historical documentary, simply escapist entertainment.

I’m all for accuracy and yes, I can understand Starkey’s point and I might often get annoyed myself at some of the glaring anomalies, but hey, the Tudors isn’t supposed to be a history lesson and people shouldn’t view it as such.

The only known surviving chain of office from the time of Henry VIII is being put up for auction.

The king gave the gold Coleridge Collar to one of his closest advisers, Sir Edward Montagu, around 1546.

The chains showed allegiance to the monarch and the intricacy of the design and quality of the metal signified the status of the wearer.

It is expected to fetch £300,000 when it goes under the hammer at Christie’s in London on 6 November.

It will be the first time that the Coleridge Collar, thought to be of the most important surviving relics of the Tudor age, has come up for auction.

Sir Edward is thought to have received the collar on his appointment to the role of Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas – one of the highest judicial officials in England.

This type of livery collar, as it was known, became popular when they were used by Henry IV as an official symbol of allegiance to the monarch.

It was known as the “collar of the Esses”, referring to the S characters used in the design alluding to the Latin religious creed Spiritus Sanctus – or holy spirit.

The Tudors later added their own designs of roses and portcullises.

Henry VIII is thought to have awarded only about 20 of the chains to loyal subjects for “special deeds” and none were believed to have survived in their entirety.

But when the role of Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas was merged with another title in 1880 to create the Lord Chief Justice of England – the chain of office became superfluous.

It then became the personal property of Lord Coleridge and passed through his family, changing ownership only once since the 19th Century.

It was discovered in the Devon family home of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge earlier this year.

Experts say the collar is similar to the one worn by Sir Thomas More in the famous portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger.

Andreas Pampoulides, Christie’s London director and co-head of sale said: “The Coleridge Collar is an extraordinary and fascinating piece of history, both as a work of art, and also as a rare Tudor relic.

“An extremely rare example of early English goldsmith-work, the collar also represents the only known, complete, surviving collar of office from the time of Henry VIII, one of the most renowned of European monarchs.”

The collar is part of Christie’s Important European Furniture, Sculpture and Tapestries sale.

The Tudors star Jonathan Rhys Meyers receives a royal welcome as he is given the Honorary Patronage award from the Trinity College Philosophical Society during a special ceremony on Sunday in Dublin, Ireland.

Society president Barry Devlin said, “We look for people who we feel represent the spirit and values embodied by former pioneering Irish people like Oscar Wilde. We are delighted to present this award to such a list of diverse and talented individuals such as Jonathan Rhys Myers.”

Tidbit: Republican presidential candidate John McCain was given this honor when he came to Trinity in 2006 to answer questions from students.

British Grammy-winning soul singer Joss Stone, 21, had hoped to play Jane Seymour in Showtime’s sexy royal series, The Tudors, which returns for a third season in spring 2009. But her touring schedule didn’t allow it, so instead she landed the role of Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.

“She wears frumpy clothes,” says Stone, from her home in Devon on a break from filming in Dublin. “None of the sexy English corsets. I’m a German weirdo. I had to have a bloody German accent and play the harpsichord.”

The upside: Henry, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, doesn’t find his German bride attractive. But Stone still will have to film a love scene during her three-episode appearance. “I just have to lie there. He’s trying to consummate the marriage. She’s a virgin and very afraid and she has no idea what to do. It’s all very uncomfortable and not working. He gets very angry.”

Acting uncomfortable was the easiest part, says Stone. “I’m not really an actress yet. At the end of the day I would love to go into acting and I am — but my first love is music.”

When David Alpay auditioned for The Tudors, he knew he’d have a chance to share the screen with a who’s who of British acting talent, in a story as English as fried food and damp curtains.

With recurring roles in Canadian shows like Slings And Arrows and Billable Hours as well as Atom Egoyan’s Ararat behind him, he nonetheless decided to take a bit of a risk.

“I never told them that I didn’t have an English accent. I kind of auditioned with an accent and just kinda got the part and bluffed my way through, I guess.”

Alpay ended up landing the role of Mark Smeaton, the court musician who became a favorite of King Henry VIII and then his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Smeaton was a rock star at the Tudor Court – the show even shows him having an affair with Anne’s brother George, a creative embroidery with no precedent in historical fact – but he met with an unfortunate end, implicated in an adulterous affair with Anne that conveniently suited both Henry’s burgeoning paranoia and his need to get rid of yet another wife who wasn’t producing an heir, though Smeaton was in all likelihood innocent.

“What’s really cool is that the show refuses to provide answers like that on the surface,” Alpay says, “and it’s not until the last two episodes of the season that we really find out what’s happening, and it’s heartbreaking, actually. Smeaton and Anne aren’t out to get the king or screw around and cause trouble. They’re just two people who, in a way, really love each other and care about each other, but the environment, the society that they live in, that has a really hard time with that. There’s a social friction that’s the kernel that grows into bigger problems later on. He’s a very innocent character who isn’t duplicitous, but seen through Henry’s eyes he seems that way. The history books though have kind of favoured Henry’s viewpoint.”